Math Stars

I've spent most of the last three days at the college, being oriented and learning all kinds of policies and meeting administrators and the like. Meanwhile, K. has been a total Math Star. Yes, I know that the phrase the kids today -- or at least the ironic hipsters today -- typically call each other is "Rock Stars", but as much as we respect the accomplishments of Sir Paul McCartney, we think it's important to emphasize academics. Or something silly like that.

But I digress. The point is that while I have been on campus, K. has been working on the upstairs bathroom. She has been painting and designing and doing all sorts of things while I have been sitting in a variety of conference rooms. So today, when I got home from learning about all my different options for insurances and other french benefits, I got back to work on tiling the upper half of the shower.

Now, I must admit that as a mathematician it would have made me very happy to use Penrose Tiles to tile the shower, or at the very least some of the Escher tiles that I like to teach my student about. But no, cheapness prevailed and we wouldnt even spring for colored squares, and we are tiling the top half of the shower with white 4" square tiles that cost us 14 cents a pop. This evening I got all but the top row on the walls -- we need to swing back by Lowes to pick up some bull nose tiles for the top row -- but this weekend I will get to grout and then my part of the bathroom will be as finished as K.'s walls. As far as an overall design scheme, we opted to aggressively accentuate the grey fixtures by painting the untiled walls grey, and keep with that theme for a rug and the shower curtain. When it is all finished it will look very fifties, but hopefully also very good. But even if it doesn't, we will post pictures.